The Love Chronicles

The Debt
Who owes Who
By
John Love

The United States currently has a total outstanding public debt load of nearly $12 trillion dollars ($11,827,966,342,208.43 depending on the date).

This means that every man, woman and child in the United States currently owes $38,930 as their share of the total national debt.

Many people see this staggering figure and ask the question – who does the United States owe all of this money to?

To start to answer this question, let’s first divide up the total national debt into two different categories – public debt and intragovernmental holdings.

As of September 17th, the US government had $7.52 trillion dollars in public debt, and an additional $4.3 trillion dollars in intragovernmental holdings.

Intragovernmental holdings represents money that the federal government has borrowed from various agencies, such as Social Security.

For instance, in the case of Social Security, the federal government has borrowed over $2 trillion dollars from the program in the form of special series, non-marketable US bonds. If the Social Security program takes in more money than it pays out, then the federal government will borrow the difference.

The government also borrows money from other programs, but Social Security is its favorite source of funding.
Ok, who is it that has been complaining and wailing to anyone who would listen that Social Security is not broke. Oh yeah, that would be me! Of the 4.2 trillion borrowed from intergovernmental holdings, 2 trillion of that was directly borrowed from Social Security. The government still to this day borrows every penny Social Security takes in over what it spends. Their gripe is that in 2015 it will even out and they will have to start paying out. They have 2 trillion of our dollars they owe to SS. The baby boomers will be long gone before that money is used. The only reason there was a huge surplus in the SS was because of the boomers. After they are gone, if administered correctly, it will pay for itself again, just without all of the surpluses as no glut of baby boomers will be out there to pay into it. What the Government wants to do is legislate less pay out to the extent they never have to pay back their debt; we boomers are expected to pay back money that was taken from us in the first place by living, in most cases, below the poverty line.

Ok, now to my second point. The rest of the debt is owned by several entities in the form of:
Pension funds
Foreign governments
Mutual funds
Foreign investors
American investors
Hedge funds
See, there is Wall Street again, they run up more than just gas prices. Get rid of Wall Street and the Fed, hell we are debt free. It is all on paper anyway. Problem is, no one would trade with us if we default, but I am not sure that is a bad thing, of course that is another argument and I do not have any ammunition for that fight, to bad someone put the gag on President Reagan, he had some definite opinions on that subject!
Back to the subject at hand, we are catering to China now, based on the debt owed, and the fact that we need to borrow another 10 trillion over the next decade from anyone willing to cover our deficit spending. You can see that by the time our grandchildren are grown, there will be no super power called the United States. We will just be in a debtor’s prison of our own making, and powerless to ever get out. If you follow Jim Mahon’s blogs you know how adamant he is about deficit spending, this is why. Deficit spending will be what brings America down. It makes the fat cats fatter, and you and I less and less until we are just the fodder of a government run by the few, for the few.
I could not find current info on money that is owed by foreign countries to the United States, but I did find some that date up to 1992 from the Library of Congress. I am sure there are better updated reports, but I did not find them. Still I can give you an idea of how lopsided world finances are. We are stilled owed money that we loaned at the end of WWI. We loaned Germany, France, and other western European countries huge amounts of money after WWII. If you take all the money that we have loaned and have either forgiven or written off as uncollectible, well it would put a huge hole in our current debt. Plus there is debt owed us by countries such as China for the help we gave long before WWII broke out, and also during and after the war that they have never even admitted they owed. So maybe we get some people with some sharp pencils, allow the old debt to assume today’s value, and let’s see how much of our debt they really own. Japan, second largest debt owner, just how much reconstruction money did we throw at that country due to our conscience over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I am not saying that we should have not had a conscience, or that Japan was not deserving of our help, but I will bet you that that debt was forgiven or forgotten, or just ignored, so again, just how much debt do we actually owe. We still pay out huge amounts of money in foreign aid. Some of the biggest recipients of our largess are Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, and Indonesia, to name a few, and guess who also has had the most debt forgiven by the United States. The point I am trying to make, we have forgiven a lot of old debt that by today’s standards would be an obscene amount of money. According to the figures I found in the Library of Congress;
In fiscal 1992 alone, the U.S. foreign aid program obligated $693 million in grants for Western
Europe (mostly military aid for Turkey, Portugal, and Greece), $719 million for Eastern Europe,
$5.399 billion for the Middle East (mostly military aid for Israel and Egypt), $937 million for Asia,
$1.812 billion for Africa, and $$1.369 billion for Latin America
Now you look at how much we are spending since 9-11 to current, the amount has to be staggering. To finally get to the point, when it comes right down to it, we are owed a lot of money by the world around us; we spend money we can’t afford in grants and other forms of aid. We wage wars in the most expensive formats possible. We take on policing the world at great expense while countries like China do nothing and reap the rewards of our efforts. We have to cut out deficit spending; we have to learn where our money does us as a nation the most good. I say it is not in the coffers of dictators or governments that funnel that money in some form to our enemies or to their own pockets. I say that we cannot afford to prop up countries and regimes until we get our own on an even keel, with a balanced budget, no hungry children, no elderly in jeopardy, no one going without basic healthcare, and no raging unemployment! Until then, we need to take care of ourselves, change how we do business on Wall Street and how much control the Fed has over our lives. We need to have a no deficit spending plan in effect. We need people in Washington who are of the people and for the people. As of now, they are not, and what is most astounding, they are so far gone; they do not know they are not. It is up to us to make the change. I am not sure how, but one way to at least let them know we want change is to vote all incumbents out of office. We need a national referendum stating what it is we do want. We of course need leaders ready and willing to take on such a task. They will be far and few between, so we need to recognize them when they appear. You can bet this candidate will not be getting any money for his campaign from oil companies or the like. At the same time, we need our big business to thrive, just not at the expense of the majority, you and me!
I just learned we finally got Osama Bin Laden, so at least that was a buck spent that I approve of. This method of fighting war is where we need to excel, not trying to tame whole countries that will revert to type as soon as we leave, making us the worlds biggest chumps!

OORAH!